ADL CEO: America Is Tipping From Hate to the Unthinkable

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, anti-Semitism is on the rise even in western democracies, including the United States. Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, is addressing that in his new book, “It Could Happen Here.” And he joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss how we can strike back against hate.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HARI SREENIVASAN: Christiane, thanks. Jonathan Greenblatt, thanks so much for joining us. When you look at the number of and the profile of the attacks, say, on the Tree of Life Synagogue or what happened in Colleyville, Texas or in Poway, California, what does what is happening to the Jewish community in the United States or, say, the Asian-American community in the United States, what do those indicate to you?

JONATHAN GREENBLATT, CEO, ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE: That’s a great question. You know, many people describe anti-Semitism as “the oldest hatred.” But, in reality, it is a bit of a barometric indicator about the health of a society. And so, often times, indeed, it is the canary in the coal mine for far worse forms of intolerance and hate. And so, when we see men marching through the streets of Charlottesville chanting, Jews will not replace us, when we see a white supremacist burst into the Tree of Life Synagogue and kill 11 people, when we see, you know, a deranged person from the black Hebrew Israelite sect and go to a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, New Jersey and gun down three people, or when we see this radicalized person, this Islamism, go into a synagogue in Texas and, again, threaten to blow up the institution in the surrounding area, these are all signs, in my opinion, of a kind of social decay. Now, it isn’t to say that anti-Semitism is new. Like I said, it’s the oldest hatred. But keep in mind, that these incidents are kind of punctuation marks in a climate where anti-Semitism has really increased in recent years. The number of incidents in 2021, Hari, were nearly double what they were just a few short years ago, right? 2019 was the highest year that the ADL has ever seen. 2020 was the third highest total. And we’ve been tracking these incidents longer than the FBI in America. We’ve been at it for more than 40 years. And so, when we consider the context, indeed, the attacks and the repeated persecution and stereotyping of the Jewish community in this country is a very concerning sign, which is why I would suggest that anti-Semitism isn’t a Jewish problem, it is an American problem. Our democracy can be measured, in many ways, by how we treat our minorities. But when the Jewish people, who found refuge in this country for hundreds of years, suddenly find themselves marginalized and stereotyped, and, again, attacked, in some instances, in broad daylight, that should be an alarm bell that’s going off for the rest of the country. Something is wrong.

SREENIVASAN: Why do you think it is that these tropes that go around about Jews controlling the banks or the media, or George Soros funding entire operations like a migrant caravan, I mean, these mistaken and just factually incorrect and blasphemous lies, get to a point where they’re kind of successfully spread, and what is the danger to, I guess, the rest of America, non-Jewish America, when the tropes continue?

GREENBLATT: Well, in many ways, one could say that anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory, right? It is this twisted world view about how the world works. It’s seeing threats where they don’t exist. It’s seeing a particular group of people responsible for that. And you know, the Jews — before the founding of the state of Israel, the Jews lived in diaspora, if you will, in exile in different countries around the world for almost 2,000 years, holding onto their religion, holding onto their culture, holding onto their language, assimilating to a degree, but always retaining their sense of Jewish identity. And indeed, I think they made for easy scapegoats, whether in Christian Europe or the Muslim Middle East, because they were sort of a small community that you could find in different places that could be blamed for whatever the issue at hand. And I think, in some ways, it is human nature, Hari, to look for someone to blame. You know, to look for that scapegoat on whom you can attribute your own failings or the unexplained issues in a society. So, this was very potent, very powerful, and it persisted across cultures, across continents. The Jews having all the power, controlling the media, controlling the banks. The Jews being the capitalists. Or the Jews being the communists and the Jews being responsible for the world’s wars. And the Jews, you know, trying to undermine societies and so on and so forth. Because, again, the conspiracy theory is a shortcut for how the world works. It provides easy answers, an easy answer to a complex problem. And I think all of us in society, whether you’re on the left or the right, whether you’re rich or poor, whether you’re Jewish or non-Jewish, we have to confront it, because unless we get our arms around conspiracy theories, Hari, and kind of get to a more honest fact-based future, I think everything is up in the air.

SREENIVASAN: So, connect the dots for me here. There’s a threat here of anti-Semitism and racism, but how does it intersect with where we are politically and where we are as a democracy or maybe a space between democracy and autocracy?

GREENBLATT: What we’ve seen in the United States in the last five plus years has been what I will characterize as the weaponization of anti- Semitism. It has become sort of a cudgel that different political parties and public persons have used to try to hammer opponents. The right accuses the left of being against the Jewish State, and therefore, somehow anti- Semitic. The left accuses the right of being, you know, prejudice to the core and therefore anti-Semitic. And the term almost loses meaning when both sides are using it against each other in a way where flaunting conspiracies and wild accusations, the weaponization of anti-Semitism. So, it loses its meaning and becomes a partisan tool as one indicator. I think a second indicator that’s related to it, Hari, has been the normalization of extremism. So, we’ve seen this, and this really started in 2016 with presidential campaign where Trump, as a candidate, was welcoming white supremacists into the public conversation in ways we’d just never seen before. When I say that, I mean the ADL, we’re the oldest anti-hate group in America, we’ve been tracking these issues and monitoring these developments for more than 100 years. And I can tell you, we had never quite had a situation like this. I mean, not since probably Henry Ford republished the protocols of Zion in the Dearborn Independent. Where we have the Trump campaign literally credentialing white supremacist media for their campaign events. How do we know that? Because we supremacist media and we were calling that out. But you saw the extremists exploit those opportunities and really move into the mainstream. And so now, today, you can’t pick up a newspaper, open your phone, and not hear crazed people who are making claims about Jewish space lasers, comparing, you know, COVID-19 precautions to the Nazi Nuremberg laws, to other kinds of wild claims, where these extremists now seem to occupy, literally, a part of the overall conversation in ways we never had before. I mean, Hari, there has always been a lunatic fringe, always, but they used to be kept on the fridge. And now, they seem to be part of the daily debate. So, the weaponization of anti-Semitism combined with the normalization of extremism has created a space in which people now think the men and women marauding through our capitol, wearing Camp Auschwitz sweatshirts or bearing decals that said 6MWE, 6 Million Wasn’t Enough. Some people in the GOP say, they were tourists. They were just out for an excursion. And you have, you know, regular claims of Jews — again, this man in Collierville claiming that Jews run the world. And he, again, was coming from a frame that we would associate with sort of Jihadist Islamism. But you have similar claims made by right-wing extremists. And this normalization of extremism is really quite frightening.

SREENIVASAN: You know, one of the things that was possible in trying to tamp all this down is that there was a shared reality that we could agree  on what took place and where. And as you write to great extent in the book, the influence of social media cannot be sort of underlined or boldfaced enough in how this sort of hatred is spreading right now.

GREENBLATT: Social media has been a super spreader of hate, and it has amplified the kind of societal instability that we’re now all reckoning with dealing. I mean, again, in an earlier time, when media provided information to the public, whether it was, you know, public news sources or private news sources, you know, commercially oriented, whether it was broadcaster, radio or print, the reality is there were things like standards and practices, editorial boards, ombudsman, there were all these means by which we would prevent the flow of, you know, wrong information. Now, today, it almost feels like people are getting their news intravenously fed to them through their phones and specifically, through the social media services that are constantly buzzing and giving people these dopamine hits. And we can’t deny the reality. When you have 3 billion people on Facebook, right, and the platform is trading hundreds of billions of messages a day, it is far more powerful, far more kind of intoxicating and far more combustible than anything we had previously. And I think for all of those reasons, and the fact that these companies, something you might know, Hari, and that I talk about it at length in the book, are exempt from the same liability that you have as a traditional media outlet. There’s a loophole in the law that was passed 20 some odd years ago that allows them to evade the kind of journalistic responsibility that governs the rest of our information flows. So, the lack of liability, combined with the algorithmic amplification of what sells has created the conditions in which social media literally has become a super spreader of hate. And if we are going to prevent it from happening here, you know, social media and services like Facebook need to be the front line in our fight.

SREENIVASAN: In the book, you have a story about Damien Patton, and I want you to tell our audience a little bit about it. It is interesting, also, for the fact that you’re now friends, but tell me his back story and it does connect to social media.

GREENBLATT: It is a remarkable story. So, Damien Patton is originally from Southern California. Jewish. But born into a broken home. Got involved with gangs as a kid and drifted toward, if you will, white supremacist gangs, skin heads and whatnot. He denied his Jewish identity. He sort of suppressed it, wouldn’t talk about it. But got so involved that he traveled to Tennessee to be part of a bigger white supremacist group. It was actually in the car with two other individuals when they shot up a synagogue one night in Nashville, Tennessee. They were arrested. Damien was a minor and, therefore, not charged and he confessed to what happened. The others went to jail for, again, you know, not just vandalizing but shooting at the synagogue, nearly killing people. Damien went on to join the military. He served in the U.S. Navy. He got involved as a mechanic in NASCAR. So, he got involved in these different things. He ended up becoming very successful as a tech founder. Created a company called Banjo that got very big, hundreds of millions of venture capital dollars behind it. They were preparing to go public. And then an investigative reporter somehow discovered Damien’s past. He had never admitted it. He hadn’t come clean to it. He had kept it sort of compartmentalized. But when it was discovered, he immediately lost his job, you know, lost his position at the company, lost much of his equity, and he was reeling. I learned about Damien when one of my supporters from Silicon Valley, it was one of his initial investors, called me and said, hey, would you talk to this man? I reached out to Damien. This was in the early days of the pandemic. And we connected via Zoom. Me in New York, he in Salt Lake City, Utah. And what I found was this person who really had this terrible experience as a young man. And, you know, in the Jewish faith, we believe in this concept called Teshuvah (ph), which roughly translates to redemption. See, I think we need to cancel cancel culture. I think Damien did commit a series of sins. I think Damien did actually pay his dead to society and we need space to embrace someone like Damien who acknowledges his errors and tries to do better. You know, over the course of the last 15 years, he’s been a philanthropist and donated a considerable amount of money to charity and Jewish causes in particular. He’s, you know, created lots of jobs. He’s done really well for himself and for society. But it took this moment, this exposure, for him to really come clean about what he did wrong. And the book is the first place where he talks openly about his past. I’m proud that ADL — like I do, I consider myself a friend of Damien’s today, because I’ve watched him grow. I’ve watched him come to terms with what he’s done, and I just think I have such respect for someone who is able to do just that.

SREENIVASAN: I remember in the case of Rwanda, there were stories about how there were radiobroadcasts comparing people to cockroaches. And when you mentioned dehumanizing, that’s what came up for me. And I wonder, you spoke with experts on genocides and civil wars and they talk to you about the kind of preconditions that were on the ground before the worst tragedies imaginable happened. What did that teach you about where America is right now when you talk about how close we are to the brink of tipping over?

GREENBLATT: Well, it’s interesting. I did speak to experts about what happened in Rwanda, what happened in Bosnia, what happened in Northern Ireland, all these situations that once might have seemed impossible to imagine came to pass. But, for me, Hari, the issue isn’t just a piece of history, it’s part of my present. You know, I’m the grandson of a holocaust survivor from Germany. My paternal grandfather and his Jewish family, you know, Germany was the only place they ever knew. And when he was a young man, he never could have imagined that his country one day would turn on him and regard him as an enemy of the state. Destroy everything that he loved. Slaughter almost his entire family and friends. And force him to flee. And he came to this country as a refugee. And I am the husband of a woman from Iran. My wife and her Jewish family, Iran was the only place they had ever known. And they never would have imagined, before the advent of the Islamic Revolution, that the country would turn on them, regard them as enemies of the state, destroy everything that they ever loved, and force them to flee for their lives, which they did, coming to this country in the late 1980s. And so, when we think about the unthinkable, when we imagined a world in which all that we know could unravel, for me, that’s not some history lesson, that’s my own life. I mean, again, just like my grandfather when he was a young person never would have guessed that his grandchildren, me, my sibling, my cousins, would be born in this country. And just like my father-in-law, when he was a young man, never could have imagined that his grandchildren, my kids, my nieces and nephews, would be born in this country. I don’t think, Hari, that I could take for granted that my grandchildren will be born in this country, unless, again, we fight for what we have.

SREENIVASAN: The book is called “It Could Happen Here: Why America is Tipping from Hate to the Unthinkable and How We Can Stop It.” Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, thanks so much for joining us.

GREENBLATT: Thank you for having me.